 Good morning everybody. I'm so glad to see everybody here in a super full room. So welcome to New America's 2017 annual conference. I'm Veronica Mooney, Director of Events at New America. And we are thrilled to share the day with you in a room of 300 of our best public problem solvers that New America has. I hope you've had a chance to grab breakfast and coffee right outside. If not, we'll still serve until about nine o'clock. But in the meantime, as you get settled, we'd like to go ahead and set the stage on the work New America is doing to activate deep impact and the possibility of American renewal. To give some opening remarks and frame the discussion, we'll have today. I'd like to welcome to the stage New America's president and CEO and race lotter. Thank you. So this is our annual coming together of the New America community. All of our staff, all of our fellows. Now our fellows is a category that continually renews and expands. We have all of our national fellows, who are our sort of intense application. This year we had 500 applications for our national fellows, our people who write wonderful books and write musicals and novels and documentaries on important public problems. This year we also have our California fellows, who are our civic entrepreneurs in the Bay Area and indeed in California as a whole, who are joining us. And we have our newest group of fellows, our fellows who are technologists in the public interest. These are engineers and designers and product managers and data scientists who are applying technology to solve public problems in the same way that we traditionally apply law and economics and policy expertise. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. Our board, our supporters, our friends, often when people ask me what is New America, a question all of us wrestle with, the easiest way to describe it is that we are an extraordinary community of writers and thinkers and researchers and analysts and technologists and social entrepreneurs who believe in the possibility of American renewal. We celebrate our present every year and last year we recounted our past. And I, for those of you who were not here, I'm going to do the mini version of that. Last year we had both Mike Lind and Ted Halstead, two of our founders along with Cheryl Schweninger and Walter Russell Mead. Talk about why they created New America in 1999 and they talked about wanting a new generation of public intellectuals, which as I said at the fellows conference yesterday meant people who could write about important public problems in English, in lively, vibrant English that would attract a broader audience than the normal think tank audience. We in this room, many of us who went to public policy school or who led a public policy school or who come to Washington, we feed on white papers and that's great, but we knew America was founded to reach a broader audience. And so we started with our fellows program for a new generation of public intellectuals. And we were also founded because our founders understood that digital technology would revolutionize this country as much as the steam engine electricity and the internal combustion engine did, and that as it did it would disrupt everything. That's an overused word, but it is an accurate word. It means how we work, how we live, how our families are organized, everything about the dimensions of our lives is driven off by these huge technological revolutions that take often decades to ripple through. So our founders actually didn't just say, well, we have disruption, they had a set of ideas for the America that they saw coming. And Ted Halstead and Mike Lind published a book called The Radical Center in 2001, and they had a set of ideas around a new social contract, and indeed New America has worked on the new social contract or the next social contract for much of our time. They had an idea of citizen-based portable benefits that would replace employer benefits, employee-based benefits. Universal health, this was again in 2001, they looked forward and said there is absolutely no way we can have the society we need without universal health, and New America played a key role in developing the idea of the individual mandate, which became the backbone of the Affordable Care Act. And then finally individual savings accounts alongside means tested social safety net. So that was one set of ideas. It is not necessarily the ideas that all of us subscribe to now, but I offer it because we had a vision of needing new public intellectuals, needing new answers, and indeed a view that those ideas would not come from the right or the left, but from what they called a home for the ideologically homeless. So that's our past, and today we're going to celebrate our present. You're going to hear from people who are part of our community, who are working on all sorts of things all day long, but what I want to do in the rest of this talk is talk about our future, the future of New America and what I see as the future of America as a whole. So we're dedicated to renewing America in the digital age, and the theme of this conference is renew America, and as I said at the core of much of our work are the problems and the opportunities created by digital disruption. What our founders saw in 1999 is ever more present today. One of the things we've done over the past year with Bloomberg has to run the shift commission on the future of work, workers and technology. We started with the premise that the predictions for how many jobs will be automated range from five to 50 percent. If it's 50 percent or even 20 or 30 percent, you are thinking about wiping out truck driving, which is the largest occupation for men in most American states, and that's coming much faster than most people anticipated that it would. So thinking about the problems and the solutions caused by digital disruption, think about how that applies to our programs. Open Technology Institute, it's very clear that is about the internet and digital technology, digital information technology being open and secure and accessible, right? So all those issues, the vision of what an open and secure internet needs to be and the policies we need to get there. When you look at our education program, well, our problems with education were not just created by digital disruption. We had plenty of problems with our educational system before the internet and there are many different causes. And of course, a lot of our work has been around financing of education. But if you think about many of the solutions, there you see genuinely new possibilities, particularly in higher ed and K through 12, around radically personalized education, which is a a paradigm shift so big that we, you know, we still think education happens in a classroom from the log cabin to Princeton University today. That doesn't have to be and many of the folks in our education program can imagine a radically different future for education. And we are working on the problems created by digital technology in our early ed program. Indeed, every time I read anything from the early ed program, I think, OK, I didn't raise my kids very well. They were looking at screens way too early and maybe I wasn't coaching and mentoring them enough in the process. But our work on early ed is really in part around how do you provide what kids need without relying entirely or even largely on screens? If you think about political reform again, those problems are not created by digital technology, although there's certainly been amplified in this last election, you could say we've got a whole new set of problems, obviously created by social media. But a lot of those problems are simply deep dysfunction and corruption. And they've happened in the last century and they're happening in this one. But again, if you think about solutions, the possibility of radical participation, whether it's through money or volunteers or engaging your your elected representatives, digital technology creates all sorts of opportunities that then allow us to imagine radical reform. I talked about future of work. The newest category of fellows and programs is technology in the public interest. And again, our new TPI fellows are here now. We opened the fellowship competition in January and February, knowing that lots of people were going to come out of the U.S. Digital Service. And those of you who were at dinner last night heard Todd Park talk about the creation of the U.S. Digital Service in the Obama administration, the recognition. And this recognition was at the core of why I wanted to be the president of this great organization, which was that in this century, when we look at public problems, any of them, politics, education, the economy, family policy, foreign policy, every public problem we care about solving, we are going to use technology as much as we use law and economic incentives, incentives and area expertise. And so our vision in this program is that you have a sprint team of engineers who can think on product. It's not just engineers, it's engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, lots, the all the people who work with digital technology and think about how can you improve the child welfare system, how can you improve veterans administration, how can you improve education, think about the college scorecard in the education department. Technology in the public interest imagines bringing all of that to the nonprofit sector. So thinking about just as a lawyer might think I can work in a law firm or I can work in government or I can work in environmental defense or at New America and OTI, a technologist will think the same thing. And when we change that definition of what tech careers look like, a whole new generation of people will want to be in technology. As Todd said last night, and I'll just quote him, I might not be so tendentious, creating apps to get sushi to rich people faster may be a great way to make a fortune, but it doesn't motivate people to create a better world. And if we can redefine what technology careers look like, we again, we'll have a whole new generation of people who choose them. And finally, our national network. We have our California fellows here. We have Dan Lurie and our Chicago staff here from New America, Chicago, which is our latest hub. In times of rapid change as fast as we are seeing it, no matter how smart we are and no matter how knowledgeable we are, we are not going to come up with solutions just by thinking. And I say that as someone who's made my life coming up with solutions just by thinking. I don't think we can do it now. I think we far be it for me to say research and analysis and writing is not important, but so many of these solutions are coming from the bottom up. They're coming from the people who are actually in the cities and the community rural communities where these problems are most acute and they are coming together and figuring out new solutions. Some of that is government driven. Some of that is business driven. And a lot of that are is civic driven by social entrepreneurs of many different kinds. So the vision of New America as a national action network is a vision of a new America that has all the people in DC who are doing the work we are doing, but we are connected to people in Indianapolis and St. Louis and Chicago and Chattanooga and New Orleans. I'm not I'm not predicting. Don't go thinking these are places we are. I'm saying those cities across the country and that our hubs in those cities are then connected to communities around the state. That is a network of national renewal. So that's why we talk about renewal in the digital age. And I know that some of you think that's already dated. I welcome another term. It was information age. I like digital age. I think it's much more accurate than information age. I welcome suggestions. Digital technology does seem to me to be the key innovation that has given rise to so much of this like steam or electricity. But I'm we're open to suggestion if you can come up with something better than the digital age. But what I want to talk about now is why renewal. Why do we keep talking about renewal. Some of you hear that as just another way of talking about make America great again. Some of you think renewal that not just new America but renewal isn't that like a nostalgia for an older America that we want to return to. I don't think so. And I want to spend the rest of this time explaining why. So make America great again is nostalgia for an era in which we had rapid economic growth. We had post war prosperity and we bestowed the world as one of two superpowers. It is also an America that was deeply segregated and deeply oppressive for women. I'm old enough that I have firsthand memories. I'm not going to say I grew up oppressed but I certainly grew up without any opportunities for women. I did not know a single woman professor doctor engineer. I knew one woman lawyer and obviously for African Americans for GLBTQ Americans for countless other minorities that is not a time people look back to and say gee that was that was great America. I get that but renewal is something else. It's not nostalgia for a particular period in American history. It's renovation. So think about the difference between a tear down and a renovation between taking your house and actually this is happening in Princeton and wiping it out and starting over and renovating an older building. So when you renovate you keep the foundation. And in this country I would argue the foundation are a set of values that our founders proclaimed even if they didn't live up to them in the way that we expect them to live up to them today. Liberty democracy equality justice. I would add tolerance and faith but after those first four people can agree to disagree. Still those values enshrined in our founding documents are the foundation. The frame is our Constitution reinterpreted amended as need be nevertheless the same Constitution. We are not France. This is not the Fifth Republic. It is still the same Constitution just like you'd keep most of the frame of a house that you were renovating. Again you might change some you might amend some but it would be the core. And then you strip away things and often get back get down to something better. We are sort of past the exposed brick in every building but still when you renovate you often find beautiful things that were covered up. When you renovate you also find things that once looked great and you now see as profoundly ugly and indeed dangerous. If you think about the what we often have to destroy when we renovate a building but you then take that building and you modernize it and you update it and you fit it to the times that you are in. And that happens again and again indeed in houses. You can walk in and know exactly when the house was last renovated by the colors in the kitchen. Avocado for the 50s you know cherry wood probably for the 90s and whoever who knows right now. But that process happens over and over again and indeed in the radical center and in much of the writings of Mike Lind and many others. There's a description of at least three Americas before now. The founding America Lincoln's America New Deal America. Those are the big three where we renewed the country. We kept the Constitution but we renewed what it meant and we renewed our laws and we renewed our society. So I want to conclude by imagining and this is my imagining although it's based on the work of many of you as well as my own thinking. What would a renewed America look like in 10 20 or 30 years. So we would I imagine we start by renewing our farming right. Our use of the land we will be farming sun and wind. There are places in America you see that already. I was in Southern California driving from LA to Indian Wells and you come through the mountains and there are farms of sun and wind. There are those farms outside Indianapolis. Indeed Indiana is the fifth most state in the union in the use of solar energy. You might expect it in California. I guarantee you didn't expect it in Indiana just as an example. We'll be farming vegetables and food that people actually eat. E.G. people who are connected in cities to farmland because we will be growing meat or we'll be making it we'll be actually making it in factories or we'll be growing it in the way we grow vegetables. We will we will have transformed the current industrial farming for reasons of health for reasons of economy and for reasons of technology. We'll also be renewing our manufacturing and that again you can see happening already. You can see it in Heartland hubs where you're starting to think about manufacturing as part of the Internet of Things right. The digital revolution has been mostly software. It will now be increasingly not just hardware but things and where are the places in the United States that have manufactured things. They are not California and New York. They are the Heartland. They are Cleveland and Chicago and St. Louis and Indianapolis and Minneapolis and many other Heartland cities. We will be renewing our economy much more broadly. So in the shift commission report there were three scenarios of what the future of work looks like that I found particularly compelling. One is the care economy and care does not just mean physical care of children and old people. Care means investing in others. Eds and meds is the care economy but it's just getting started. The explosion of coaching jobs and advising jobs. Atul Gawande just gave his TED talk on how medicine will shift to telemedicine with coaches for doctors. Teaching moves from my sitting up here and lecturing all of you to the flipped classroom where you learn what I would lecture online but then you don't just do it on your own. You have a personalized coach. We're already seeing an explosion of coaches although it's generally just code for therapy so we have executive coaches and career coaches and life coaches and that's fine if that's a better way to go but there's a huge explosion combining big data with enabling people to reach their highest potential. That's the care economy. The craft economy. We're going to see a renewal of cottage industry. We're already seeing it in craft beer as when Jim Fallows was here a couple of years ago he stood up and said how do you know that a city is renewing the presence of a craft brewery. That was one of his 11 things. The other was cheap real estate which is equally important. But craft brewers are just the beginning. The master brewers, master masons, master builders, all those names, master Smith's those Anglo Saxon names but they're also in every other language here. They referred to craft and we'll see a renewal of that craft but on a much more high tech basis because when 3D printing really comes into its own and you can see it already you can print extraordinary things like furniture but it's not going to just be anybody who can do that. There will be craft again. And finally what I think of as the cleanup economy. Who's going to what's going to happen to all our strip malls right when we think about renewal we should start with our physical infrastructure. Route one where I live is nothing but strip malls and they were all built between 1960 and now they are dying right retail shops in strip malls. You can see now that they're already empty. What's going to happen to them? We're going to tear them down. We're going to create new structures for the ways we will live and work in in a renewed America. Few more things renewing our families and here I don't know that Mia Bird song is here this year. I think I celebrated her last year but she's one of our California fellows who argues that the African-American family is not dysfunctional. Not this deviant departure from a two parent two kid norm but actually a deeply resilient and flexible and adaptable structure to constantly change to constant change and often disaster it's ways that people come together and support each other under rapidly changing circumstances. I would argue that all American families need to be that way whether they are biological or as is often much more the case they're the people we love renewing our politics equal protection of the law will come to mean equal participation in shaping the law and implementing the law that is a work of our of our political reform program the papers it's not just equal money it may never be equal money but it does have to be equal participation the work of Holly Russ and Gilman on participatory democracy the work of many of our tech folks on how you participate in actively providing government services and monitoring the provision of government services and finally the room as I said the renewal of our infrastructure new America has always been on the forefront of renewing our physical infrastructure now we are working as hard as we can to ensure that our digital infrastructure is open to all so last we can't renew this country if we all do not also renew our identity what does it mean to be in an American and yesterday many of us heard George Packer list four different American identities I will not go through all of them but he essentially said we need a new American identity our American identity is up for grabs at the after this election and Marsha Chatelain one of our new America fellows who is at Georgetown raised the question she said it's clear what our identity is you as a white man just don't want to recognize it you don't want to acknowledge that we have a deeply racist identity and that's what came out in this election that in fact the majority of Americans want to go backwards want to go backwards to a world of segregation and deep deep deep oppression for African Americans and then Zia Haider what another one of our fellows a wonderful novelist said how can you possibly talk to the other side if you're calling them deplorables or racist or sexist or everything else that is a fault line right now and I'm going to be talking to Chimamanda DJ about just that question how do people address people on the other side of a horrific political divide I'll just give you my answer there is no one answer but it is a question we must grapple with and we must be able to grapple with openly and at a place like New America if we can't talk about it God help the rest of the country so we could take the view that we really need a second we are effectively on the brink of a second civil war there are people of color and their white allies on one side and white Americans on the other and the issue is white supremacy are we going to be the country that many Americans appear to want to go back to or are we going to be the America that frankly demographically we know we're going to be which is a majority minority country with a different definition of what un-American looks like I don't think we can afford a second civil war the first one was the bloodiest conflict in our history and even if it's not fought on battlefields it will be fought in every city across the country and the violence will destroy countless people I think we need a concept of American identity that sees the best in each other while recognizing very clear limits as to what is legitimate in political discourse and in personal discourse I think you can say you can condemn racism where it where it is or sexism or any other ism but you can also look at people who voted differently and recognize the fear and the anxiety and the loss and the ignorance that underlies why they feel the way they do and recognize it hear it and then respond to it to do that we have to find good things in our past as well as bad I grew up in Charlottesville Virginia Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner and he slept with his wife's half-sister and father and children with her we know that he was also a revolutionary for his time to say that all men were created equal even if that meant all white men of property was still revolutionary it was the birth of something genuinely new and those same words are there for interpretation first all men then all women and then really all people meaning not just on paper if we can find some good things as well as bad things if we can hear each other if we can feel the emotion underneath the hatred and the rage and the and the deep anxiety we can find a common vision of a renewed America and this organization can be an engine of that renewal thank you very much